Boolean Black Belt-Sourcing/Recruiting

The Blog

Social Engineering: The Human Element of Sourcing and Recruiting from Glen Cathey Why is the “Boolean Black Belt” writing and presenting about social engineering? Well, it’s actually quite simple. It all started over 20 years ago when I began working for a small, privately held IT staffing firm in Northern VA. In pursuit of becoming the top performing recruiter, I … Read More

I recently had the chance to participate in a Google Hangout with Jeremy Roberts of HiringSolved as an introduction to the speakers of their upcoming conference on Feb 7 in NYC (HIREconf). You can watch the recording of our chat here or play the video below to learn a little about my background and my thoughts about the evolving role of technology … Read More

There are people in the HR/recruiting industry who believe that searching databases, the Internet, and social networking sites to source talent is relatively easy and that it can be automated through the use of technology. While those people are actually right (to an extent), I am happy to say that unfortunately for them, it’s not that simple. While anyone can manually write or automate basic searches and find … Read More

While many people are hungry for specific Boolean search strings to copy and paste and for search tools that make searching for people “easier” and even “do the thinking for you,” there simply is nothing that can come remotely close to what you can do when you think properly and ask the right questions. That’s right – the most powerful … Read More

When it comes to sourcing and recruiting, it’s gotten easier to find people but it’s gotten more difficult to get people to respond to emails, InMails, social messages and voicemails. The poor quality and lack of sophistication of most recruiter messaging, along with rampant spamming, certainly hasn’t helped. Unfortunately and yet somewhat thankfully, the bar of what people expect to … Read More

I originally published this post on LinkedIn, but am reposting here to ensure my blog readers catch it. When I attended LinkedIn’s Talent Connect 2015 conference in Anaheim, CA and I was able to take some video of Eddie Vivas, Head of Talent Solutions Product for LinkedIn, formerly the Founder and Chief Product Officer at Bright.com (acquired by LinkedIn), talking about … Read More

Have you ever wondered: How many resumes, social profiles, names, etc., you have to identify to result in 1 hire? How efficient your sourcing/recruiting/hiring process is? How many candidates you need to submit to fill your position? How more effective messaging/engagement strategies and tactics can measurably improve your efficiency? How wonderful it would be if you could educate your hiring … Read More

When it comes to sourcing and recruiting, you should not ignore the potential of Facebook given that it has 1.38B monthly active users and 890M daily active users. Also, you should know that according to Jobvite’s 2014 Job Seeker Nation Report, 76% of social job seekers found their current position through Facebook. Jobvite also found that while job seekers … Read More

At LinkedIn’s 2014 Talent Connect event in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to be interviewed on the topic of up-skilling recruiting teams. Watch this short video to hear my thoughts on the ideal sourcing/recruiting team alignment, critical skills for any recruiting team, and the future of recruiting (hint – it has something to do with data).

It is difficult to ignore the potential of Facebook when it comes to sourcing and recruiting given that it has 1.38B monthly active users and 890M daily active users. When Graph Search was introduced back in 2013, it was an amazingly powerful people sourcing tool. However, recent changes have somewhat reduced its efficacy. While some people might think that … Read More

Nearly a year ago I stumbled across an interesting post on LinkedIn that revealed that Facebook’s single biggest recruiting focus was NOT what most people would assume. Can you guess what it might be? Software engineering? Nope. Infrastructure? Wrong. People and recruiting? Not even close.

If you have a premium account with LinkedIn and haven’t been living under a rock, you are aware of LinkedIn’s InMail policy change which will, for most people, reduce the total number of InMails they are able to send. However, their new policy does open up the possibility of unlimited InMails, provided you can achieve a 100% response rate. … Read More

Irina posted an interesting piece on discrepancies in search results between LinkedIn Recruiter and a free LinkedIn account which prompted me to do a little digging as I don’t think I’ve ever come across materially different results in actual use. While the discrepancies are definitely interesting, and I would love to know exactly what’s causing them, I don’t find … Read More

In theory, building a talent “pipeline” sounds like an ideal strategy, ensuring that you always have a steady supply of the talent you’re looking for. In reality, there are many issues with building talent pipelines, and they all “leak” extensively. I recently delivered the closing keynote at the always excellent Talent42 technical recruiting conference where I explored the core issues associated with … Read More

Do you source and/or recruit software engineers? Would you like to know how to find software engineers on Stack Overflow who are actually interested in hearing about new career opportunities? For free? If you answered YES!, YES! and YES! – you’re in in luck, because I am going to show you how to find active and passive job seekers … Read More

While you may not know that Balazs Paroczay recently posted a rebuttal of my proposed definition of sourcing, I strongly suggest you read his argument, as I appreciate his perspective as well as the fact that he disagrees with me on the definition of sourcing and I’d like to hear your opinion. I believe disagreement is important and valuable, … Read More

I hope my blog post wasn’t somehow the kiss of death for Tactics Cloud, but in only a matter of weeks after writing about how awesome I thought their Twitter search solution was, they will no longer be offering Tactics Cloud as they have decided to focus our efforts on new opportunities.” Although Derek Zeller discovered that you could still … Read More

Do you leverage Twitter in your sourcing and recruiting efforts? If NO – I strongly recommend you read my 14 Tips on How to Use Twitter for Social Recruiting and see the two comments from Matt Chiasson. If YES – would you be interested in a better way to search for and find people in your target talent pool on Twitter? Look … Read More

I am pleased to share a cool and very practical free Chrome extension that allows you to quickly and easily view the public profiles of LinkedIn members beyond your 2nd degree network, thus showing you their full name. Victor Soroka first shared Lippl with me back in January. I had the honor of meeting him while at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect … Read More